DEAR Inventory vs QuickBooks

2017. Intuit acquired time-tracker TSheets



Intuit, the company behind products like QuickBooks, acquired TSheets, a time-tracking service and employee scheduling app with over 35,000 customers for $340 million. There’s an obvious overlap between the markets for QuickBooks and TSheets, both of which mostly target small to medium businesses. Indeed, Intuit tells us that the companies already share 12,000 customers. Clearly this isn’t a play to acquire new customers, but to build out the QuickBooks ecosystem and it’s worth noting that TSheets already offers an integration with QuickBooks. In talking to Intuit over the last few months, this idea of removing friction is very much at the heart of the company’s current product plans, especially with regard to QuickBooks.


2014. Intuit acquired cloud integration service ItDuzzit



Intuit continues to build out its cloud platform for SMB by acquiring itDuzzit — the startup that provides tools for businesses to integrate different web and mobile apps with each other (something think IFTTT for enterprises). The idea here is that Intuit will add itDuzzit to its QuickBooks platform, which provides accounting and increasingly many other adjacent services to businesses. ItDuzzit competes against the likes of Zapier and Cloudwork. The dozens of apps that can be linked up using the itDuzzit include the likes of Asana, Box, Coinbase, Freshbooks, PayPal and Shopify, with promises of further apps to come. What it essentially means is that while Inuit may not have its own hand in each of those pies (yet), it will give its customers an easy way of using them on its platform and with Intuit software regardless.


2008. Intuit launches QuickBooks Online Edition



Intuit is the biggest player in the accounting software space, its QuickBooks product having massive following in the SMB space with over three millions users. QuickBooks Online Edition (QBOE) is its response to the growing popularity of web-based and online accessible offerings. Available now for several years, QBOE has had slow, but steady, uptake. QBOE does some of the major things that businesses need. It's got full double-entry accounting, allowing for correct balance sheets, profit and loss statements and trial balances to be run from it. The starting point for QBOE is the home screen. Unlike other online accounting apps which try and depict a "dashboard view" is where their business is at, the QBOE home screen is more a process diagram, showing a workflow style diagram that allows the user to dive into different functional area of the accounting system. The Basic edition covers the bare essentials - accounts receivable, expense tracking and check printing, arguably quite limited functionality for $10 a month. The Plus version adds estimates and invoice customisations, time tracking, recurrent billing, budgeting and online billing to the mix.


2008. Accounting on the go: Quickbooks for iPhone and Blackberry



Quickbooks, one of the leading accounting packages for small businesses, has just released web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone. The iPhone version, seen to the left, sports a very slick UI and allows easy, at-a-glance access to all of your financial information, entered into Quickbooks Online. At first glance, the web app provides a simplistic view of things. Features included are looking at who owes you, who you owe, vendors, employees, and bank accounts. Despite the initially simplistic look, as you drill down, you uncover a whole new level of detail. Even though this seems to be a killer app for referring to your financial information, I have to point out some points where they have missed the mark. First off, a standalone app, available through the App Store would have been nice for the iPhone, but it's not completely necessary. The largest oversight here is not being able to edit or add data. In my opinion, this would be one of the primary usage scenarios for this app. That said, this is version one of this app and we may see this sort of functionality being added at some point down the line.  If you are already a Quickbooks Online user, these new web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone are nice perks. I'm not sure that the introduction of these apps would be the deciding factor in jumping to Quickbooks Online, but it might help the decision.